Wallonia

Roman Tournai became, in the 5th century, the first capital of the Franks: Childeric I was buried there in 481 and his son Clovis set out from it to conquer Gaul. From 980 Liège was the seat of prince-bishops who ruled an independent church state within the Holy Roman Empire for eight centuries, while the counties of Hainaut and Namur and the duchy of Luxembourg passed to Burgundy and then to the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs. Charles the Bold burned Dinant in 1466 and Liège in 1468, Louis XIV's wars were fought over the Meuse fortresses, and Napoleon's final defeat came at Waterloo, in Walloon Brabant, on 18 June 1815.

Wallonia was the first part of continental Europe to industrialise. William Cockerill, a Lancashire mechanic, built spinning machines at Verviers from 1799; his son John opened the ironworks at Seraing in 1817, and coal from the Borinage, Charleroi and Liège fed furnaces, glassworks and zinc smelters all along the Sambre and Meuse. The new Belgium of 1830 was run in French on Walloon wealth. The pits also bred a militant labour movement and, from 1912, when the Charleroi socialist Jules Destrée told the king "Sire, there are no Belgians", a Walloon political identity.

The wars of the 20th century fell hard on the region. The forts of Liège held out against the German invasion for eleven days in August 1914; German troops shot 674 civilians at Dinant on 23 August, the day the British army fought its first battle at Mons. In December 1944 Hitler's last great offensive in the west, the Battle of the Bulge, struck through the Ardennes and encircled the Americans in Bastogne, whose commander, General McAuliffe, answered a surrender demand with "Nuts!". Decline followed: the Bois du Cazier fire of 8 August 1956 killed 262 miners, 136 of them Italian, the last pit shut in 1984 and steel shrank with it. The state reform of 1980 gave Wallonia its own government, seated at Namur.

Walloons speak French with their own turns — septante and nonante for seventy and ninety — over a layer of older Romance languages: Walloon proper around Liège, Namur and Charleroi, Picard in Tournai and Mons, Lorrain in the Gaume around Virton. These survive mainly among the old, in dialect theatre and in Liège's puppet hero Tchantchès. Some 79,000 people in nine eastern municipalities around Eupen and Sankt Vith, transferred from Germany in 1920, speak German and run their own community government. The flag is a red cockerel on yellow, and the regional holiday, the Fêtes de Wallonie, fills Namur on the third weekend of September.

Folklore is taken seriously. On Shrove Tuesday at Binche hundreds of Gilles, in wax masks and later in towering ostrich-feather hats, dance to drums and throw oranges to the crowd; Malmedy has its Cwarmê and Stavelot its white-hooded, long-nosed Blancs Moussis at mid-Lent. Mons stages the Doudou on Trinity Sunday, when Saint George fights a dragon on the Grand-Place and spectators grab for hairs from its tail; Ath parades giants in August; companies in Napoleonic uniform escort saints' relics through the villages between the Sambre and the Meuse; and Namur's stilt-walkers have jousted in two teams since at least 1411. Binche, Mons, the marches and the stilt-jousters are all on UNESCO's intangible heritage list.

The old industrial basin votes socialist and stays proudly working-class, and Walloons cultivate a reputation for being warmer and less hurried than their Flemish neighbours — the mascot of Namur is a snail. Liège, the self-styled Cité ardente, holds its biggest party on 15 August in the Outremeuse quarter. Dinant gave its name to dinanderie, medieval brassware, and gave the world Adolphe Sax, born there in 1814; Georges Simenon was born in Liège, and the Dupuis publishing house at Marcinelle launched the comic weekly Spirou in 1938.

Wallonia has about 3.7 million people, a third of Belgium's population on more than half its land. Most live in the old industrial furrow that runs from Mons through La Louvière and Charleroi to Namur and Liège. Charleroi, with about 200,000 people, and Liège, slightly smaller but the centre of Wallonia's largest urban area, are the big cities; Namur, the capital, and Mons come next, with Tournai, Verviers, Seraing and La Louvière the other sizeable towns. Walloon Brabant — Wavre, Waterloo and the 1970s university town of Louvain-la-Neuve — is a wealthy commuter belt for Brussels, while the province of Luxembourg, in the Ardennes, is the emptiest in the country, and many people around Arlon work across the border in the Grand Duchy.

The economy is still adjusting to the loss of coal and steel. Liège's last blast furnaces went cold after 2011 and Caterpillar announced the closure of its Charleroi plant in 2016; unemployment runs well above the Flemish rate, and the wealth gap feeds Belgium's long argument over money. The replacements are real, though: vaccine and drug plants around Wavre and Braine-l'Alleud, aerospace at Gosselies and Herstal, where FN has made firearms since 1889, and a cargo airport at Liège that is among Europe's busiest. The Ardennes live on forestry, Belgian Blue cattle and Dutch and Flemish weekenders.

Life is slower than in the north. Shops close on Sundays, the bakery and the friterie on the square anchor each neighbourhood, and lunch is still a proper meal in the smaller towns. Sunday morning in Liège means La Batte, the long Sunday market strung along the Meuse quays. Current worries are the region's public debt, the worn centres of Charleroi and the Liège valley, and rebuilding after the floods of July 2021.

Liège cooking is sweet-and-sour. Boulets à la liégeoise are large pork-and-beef meatballs in a sauce made with sirop de Liège, a dark paste of boiled-down apples and pears, and served with frites; the same syrup is spread on bread with Herve, the pungent washed-rind cheese of the pastures east of the city. The Liège waffle, dense and studded with pearl sugar that caramelises on the iron, is sold hot in the street; salade liégeoise mixes green beans, potatoes and bacon; and the local spirit is peket, a juniper gin drunk neat or fruit-flavoured.

The Ardennes supply jambon d'Ardenne, salted and wood-smoked ham, dry sausages, river trout and, in autumn, wild boar, venison and hare. The Gaume in the far south has its own pâté gaumais, a pie of marinated pork. Along the Meuse, Dinant bakes the couque, a honey biscuit pressed in carved wooden moulds and hard enough to threaten teeth, and the flamiche, a hot cheese tart; Namur raises petit-gris snails, and Wépion, just upstream, grows the country's most prized strawberries. Nivelles has tarte al djote, a tart of chard and cheese, and Tournai its rabbit with prunes, eaten on the Monday after Epiphany.

Three of Belgium's Trappist breweries are Walloon: Chimay, at Scourmont abbey in southern Hainaut, which also makes cheese; Rochefort, in the Famenne; and Orval, in the Gaume, whose single dry, hoppy ale is poured beside the ruins of the medieval abbey. Hainaut's farms created saison, a dry ale once brewed in winter for the summer's field hands — Dupont at Tourpes is the benchmark — while Jupiler lager comes from Jupille outside Liège. Spa's spring water has been bottled and exported since the 16th century, and a few vineyards on the slopes of the Meuse and Sambre have revived winemaking.

The Meuse is the region's spine. Namur sits where the Sambre joins it, beneath a citadel that ranks among the largest in Europe, reached by cable car. Upstream, Dinant is squeezed between river and cliff: the onion-domed collegiate church of Notre-Dame, the citadel 408 steps above it, Adolphe Sax's house and the split pinnacle of the Rocher Bayard. Nearby are the water gardens of Annevoie, the château and climbing cliffs of Freÿr, kayak runs down the Lesse and the caves of Han-sur-Lesse.

Liège rewards a day: the Prince-Bishops' Palace, the 12th-century Mosan brass font in Saint-Barthélemy, the 374 steps of the Montagne de Bueren and Santiago Calatrava's white Guillemins station. East of it Spa — the town that named all the others, UNESCO-listed in 2021 among the Great Spa Towns of Europe — keeps its springs, casino and thermal baths, with the Spa-Francorchamps circuit and Stavelot's abbey close by. Above them the Hautes Fagnes, a plateau of raised bog crossed on boardwalks, reaches Belgium's highest point, 694 metres, at the Signal de Botrange.

The Ardennes proper are a forested plateau cut by the looping Ourthe, Amblève and Semois. Bouillon's castle, which Godfrey of Bouillon sold in 1096 to pay for his crusade, stands over a bend of the Semois; La Roche-en-Ardenne and tiny Durbuy are the classic stone-built bases, and Orval's abbey ruins lie in the Gaume. The Bastogne battlefields centre on the star-shaped Mardasson Memorial and the Bastogne War Museum beside it, the Sherman tank on McAuliffe Square and the foxholes of the Bois Jacques.

In the west, Mons has a baroque belfry, the collegiate church of Sainte-Waudru and, close by, the Neolithic flint mines of Spiennes, the Grand-Hornu colliery and the Saint-Symphorien cemetery, where the soldiers traditionally held to be the first and last Commonwealth dead of the First World War lie a few metres apart. Tournai's five-towered cathedral and the boat lifts of the Canal du Centre complete Hainaut, and the Waterloo battlefield, with its Lion's Mound, lies in Walloon Brabant.